JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Anxiety disorders are the most prevalent mental disorders globally, with significant impact on quality of life. Understanding anxiety themes and how they change over time and across countries is crucial to informing adoption of preventive and treatment strategies.

Objective:

The aim of this study was to track the trends in anxiety themes between 2004 and 2020 in the 50 most populous countries with high volumes of internet search data.

Methods:

We used a crowdsourced questionnaire, alongside Bing search query data and Google Trends search volume data, to identify themes associated with anxiety disorders across 50 countries from 2004 to 2020. We analysed themes and their mutual interactions and investigated the associations between countries’ socioeconomic attributes and the anxiety themes using time-series linear models.

Results:

Query volume for anxiety themes was highly stable in countries from 2004 to 2019 (Spearman r=0.89) and moderately correlated with geography (r=0.49 in 2019). Anxiety themes were predominantly long-term and personal, with “having kids”, “pregnancy” and “job” the most voluminous themes in most countries and years. In 2020, “COVID-19” became a dominant theme in 27 countries. Countries with a constant volume of anxiety themes over time had lower fragile state indexes (P=0.0071) and higher individualism (P=0.0032). A rise in the volume of the most searched anxiety themes was associated with a reduction in the volume of the remaining themes in 13 countries and a rise in 17 countries; and these 30 countries had lower prevalence of mental disorders (P=0.0004) than the countries where no correlations were found.

Conclusions:

Internet search data could be a potential source for predicting country-level prevalence of anxiety disorders, especially in under-studied populations or when in-person survey is not viable.